Geography professor awarded Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship

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Geography professor awarded Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship

Jesse Ribot was acknowledged for his work in rural environmental justice and development policy. He hopes that the recognition will give attention to the uses of studying social science in solving problems of environmental vulnerability.

Photo courtesy of Jesse Ribot

Jesse Ribot was acknowledged for his work in rural environmental justice and development policy. He hopes that the recognition will give attention to the uses of studying social science in solving problems of environmental vulnerability.

Photo courtesy of Jesse Ribot

Photo courtesy of Jesse Ribot

Jesse Ribot was acknowledged for his work in rural environmental justice and development policy. He hopes that the recognition will give attention to the uses of studying social science in solving problems of environmental vulnerability.

University Geography professor, Jesse Ribot, has been awarded the 2018 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

According to the Guggenheim Foundation website, the fellowship this year was awarded to 173 scholars, scientists and artists chosen from a group of about 3,000. This is the Foundation’s 94th competition.

This year’s fellowship recipients represent 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 69 different academic institutions, 31 states and three Canadian provinces.

Ribot’s work concentrates on rural environmental justice and development policy, with a focus on the politics of resource access and climate-related vulnerability of certain populations.

“It is lovely to feel acknowledged,” Ribot said in an email. “Now I better do something.”

Ribot said he hopes to influence his field of work by conducting “deep evidence-based research” on the social causes of climate-related vulnerability using this fellowship. This includes long-term, ethnographic, multi-site and field-based research.

“I hope to make it obvious that this kind of research is required for making sense of crises associated with climate change,” he said.

Ribot said he hopes to make clear that merely quantitative or statistical evidence-based research cannot explain climate disasters or the factors that make people vulnerable in the face of climate stress.

Ribot also said social science research on vulnerability has been ignored in technical circles.

“It would be nice to get modelers and other physical ‘scientists’ to actually consider the possibility of taking social science seriously,” he said.

Ribot said he enjoys working with and running research programs with large cohorts of young scholars and sharing his work with the people he studied by going back, seeing what they think and giving them some ammunition to fight for their rights.